Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) on Monday said he has “not closed the door” on running for Speaker of the House.
Ryan told MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson that Rep. Joseph Crowley’s (D-N.Y.) primary loss in June against up-and-coming star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez prompted him to consider running for Speaker.
“We’re going to have these conversations, I think, after the election,” he said.
Democrats are hoping to flip 23 seats in midterm elections in November to retake the House from Republicans. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has announced his retirement and said he will not seek reelection this year.
Ryan had said last month that Democrats needed to re-evaluate the future of the party’s leadership following Crowley’s primary.
As the No. 4 House Democrat, Crowley had been seen as a possible successor to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who has served as Democratic leader in the House for more than a decade.
“The Crowley race changed a lot for a lot of us,” Ryan told Politico in an interview last month. “There was a lot of assumption that he was going to be moving forward in leadership, and so losing that election put everybody in a state of mind to reevaluate what was happening.”
Ryan also told Politico at the time that several colleagues had approached him about mounting a challenge to Pelosi, but he added that he “wouldn’t get in unless I thought I could win.”
Ryan, who has served in the House since 2003, ran for minority leader in 2016, garnering about a third of the caucus’s votes. He is among a number of Democrats who have called for new leadership in the party to replace Pelosi.
On the Republican side, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) have each announced their intentions to run for Speaker.